Before going in to work.

Okay so my last major endeavor in art was going through all the photos I could find that either (a) had myself in the picture or (b) I had taken the picture itself...somehow related to me/myself, but no incredibly important.
I selected about 50+ picture I thought I might be able to find on Flickr.com either b/c the subject matter was common (little kid eating corn on the cob- ended up using that one) or I selected ones that while uncommon, they had easily identifiable "tags" associated with the picture (redhead + aviators, or rabbit + hotair + balloon, etc). I was able to find about 20 pictures that almost mirrored my own photomemories.


For this semester I want to continue the flickr culture and all that it has to offer. Some things I've noticed are shared memories, fictionalized narratives, empathy, presentation through editing, and some ideas associated with web 2.0 culture.

My current technique for finding interesting photos on flickr is to constantly refresh the "most recent page" which can have anywhere from 800-5,000 new "uploads" in the past minute. This, in my opinion, is the most randomized and varied sampling. With the exception of time and date (flickr is world wide and different types of people could possibly upload at set times) I can get a nice range of subject matter. Although whether 2am on a tuesday or 3pm on a saturday (now) there are universals that are documented in snapshots.
These "shared memories" are intensely personal to the owner who participated in that experience, documented by the photograph. A note on experience the actual event depicted is that although we can empathize with a person and imagine based upon our experience what it must have been like to be there at that moment, no amount of accompanying narrative (text, titling, or a grouping of photos...would video matter?) can close the gap that actually owning the memory that the photo represents bridges. This also goes viceversa when we try to connect to others by setting up various cues to present or display a desired emotion or scene.

This brings me to my next point of fictionalized narratives in that because we are not the proprietors of the memory of the actual event, we use associative cues to create our own narratives to what we see, with the lacking information being fictionalized for our own interpretation.
Okay off to work, but will edit or continue from here later...